It was plain to the drow matron that this song was about fear, and it was infectious, sinking into the minds of the goblins and spreading along their racial psyche... and it was being fed into their com system, too, helping perpetuate it further, faster.

It was meant to intimidate... and it was succeeding in that task very, very well.

It never mentioned her name, but did it need to? The endless strafing of violet lasfire girt up in those green flames of goblin-slaying, the whiteness that wiped away even the soul, and had perma-killed those who thought themselves beyond death...

The drow had thought the four breshkt women in Bloodheart possessed of a great secret, which could allow them to threaten even their longest-lived, cleverest, and most threatening foes with death. The hunt for the secret had been ferocious once those slain and cooked in the shadowfire had not come back.

And then, this white fire was all over the galaxy.

How they had not paid attention to it when it was released to the severed sectors of the Human Empire, she didn't know. Perhaps they just had not considered it important, a psychic trick they wouldn't bother to use, something not worth investigating, coming from the humans as it did.

But now everyone, everywhere seemed to have it. It was being leaked at an impressive rate to anyone who wanted to know about it, and was sending underquakes throughout the galaxy.

It Fed those who thought themselves undying to the Land, and the more unnatural they were, the faster it fed them.

It had already been over a year since the Bloodheart Grand Ritual, and the drow had plenty of time to learn of the vivic procedures for making weapons, even making a few themselves.

Unfortunately, the unwhite fire was lethal to the most powerful among them!

Those infected by Warp energies, or who had cheated death, were devoured by the unwhite fire as readily as the undead or demons. The only way to stop the flames from devouring them if they were struck was to sever the flesh. If they were killed, their corpses were devoured with unreal speed, reduced to ash and mist, and their souls, which should have been whisked away by necrotech, were burned into nothing with them.

It suddenly made trips into the Prime even more dangerous for the drow, especially the leaders who had once had no fear of death here, even were the humans capable of harming them.

That had all changed now.

Madame Lolith had a secret that even the most cunning of her rivals did not know: it was the fact that she had never died.

Without that one fact hanging over her, she did not have to fear the vivic fire so much, and although her skin was midnight black, she had denied the powers of the Warp for thousands of years, and would continue to do so in the future. Her will was her own, and she would not be swept up in Klaw's mindless slaughter, Amourae's unrestrained excesses, jRaztl's endless arrogance and superiority, or Riggibuhl's mindless enduring of the inevitable.

She was Lolith, the Grand Mistress of the Bloodheart, who had no equals among the drow in blades or beauty. There had been countless challengers over the millennia, men and women, and countless others vying for her attention, her caress, her smile, a stroke of her hand, or even a kiss from her lips. The price some were willing to pay for her attention was quite shocking, and amusing, yet only further affirmation of how unique and powerful she was.

She had never been treated as casually by anyone as she was being treated now.

This young woman was obviously no breshkt, nor were her erstwhile daughters. \"Matron Glayia\" didn't exist in any records of the drow, whose records held truly frightening amounts of information to be plumbed by cybermancers and akashic raiders.

What she was... was insanely dangerous.

She wasn't showing off for Madame Lolith, however it might look. Lolith wouldn't have tolerated anyone looking down at her like that... but this was different.

She was being casually ignored... as irrelevant.

Just keeping up with her, she had killed over a thousand goblins by now. Alchemicals kept fatigue at bay, as well as the life energy siphoned off by her knives from the low creatures she was slaughtering in passing, dealing deaths with flickers and ghosts of her hand.

She was being outrun, outkilled, outmaneuvered, and out-thought.

It was a novel experience. She could not remember such a thing happening in combat for over six thousand years.

Oh, she had been outmaneuvered politically before, information manipulated, ending up doing the bidding of foes and rivals that she thought she was working against... but such petty schemes were not her strength, and those that used her inevitably ended up dead, a perfect record of fates of those who angered her that led back for thousands of years. Certainly, they thought they could capture her, trap her, evade her hungry blades when she came for them... but while there were better schemers, none were better killers, and all of them had fallen in the end.

This woman was not using gravity manipulation, and was moving as weightlessly as a null-g acrobat. Her precision and agility were no less than Lolith's own, and her casual strength was considerably greater, equal to a fully cyberized agent, or someone operating under mass alchemical boosting.

Or, perhaps, a Warp Demon. Except Warp Demons were like fuel to vivus, and certainly wouldn't be using it on every Weapon they wielded.

Lolith watched those five Tails spitting spikes of transpsychic force wreathed in wrathflames narrowly. Their range was limited, of course, but their power was considerable, and their accuracy murderous. They were psychic limbs, woven of ectoplasm, and there had been multiple intercepted reports of her manifesting them and dismissing them. Likewise, the inhuman limbs connected to her hips and capable of rotating and bending impossibly were artificial.

She had never seen the like of either, and they had tellingly not been brought out in the Great Ceremony. Seven additional limbs... that was more than most cyborgs could manage efficiently, especially with the terrifying accuracy she was employing.

Her battlefield awareness was a full sphere, calculating, lethal, precise, yet fluid and powerful all at once. The Shield rotating around her intercepted so many would-be lucky shots, deflecting them into others, smashing away rockets and missiles in blasts of force...

She wielded only the one sword, and Lolith was watching the course of its movements, everything it sliced through, the Sun Strikes discharging relentlessly, the arcs and stars launched from it when nothing was in reach which reaped and tore the hapless goblins who thought they'd escaped death from Spike or hard light.

All of that firepower could be directed at her, and she knew she couldn't evade it all. There was a terrible underlying threat in her swordplay, some greater profundity to it that she didn't understand, but recognized as being as murderously dangerous as her own pure skill and millennia of experience.

She was better than this strange woman... but if they fought, and this woman just used her natural gifts, and no odd surprises or strange devices... Madame Lolith felt that she might well lose!

Of course, she would never fight fairly if that was truly the case, as winning was everything, but she had the certain sense that the woman opposite her was also taking her measure, and this type of endless killing was naturally only using her most basic, fundamental skills, with precious little effort on her part.

That was enough to make her blood icy, and her heart race at the same time. Indeed, who else was qualified to see them fight? What could she learn in a fight like this? It had been so long since she had seen something that was truly new or innovative, and something about this woman's fighting style bespoke an evolution of combat that was... transcendent.

Lolith desperately wanted that knowledge for herself. She had reviewed the tapes of the four women hundreds of times, analyzing every motion, step, stroke, and stance as they wrought terrible doom upon everyone that opposed them. They were all different in basis, very similar in fundamentals, and all of them had a thrillingly dangerous spirituality to them that implied how deadly they would be to face.

---

She dropped down abruptly into a ditch, where nothing seemed to be waiting. Lolith smelled the fur and filth, saw the depression on the grounds, the ever-so-faint blur of distorted air, and the sudden whine of powering-up energy weapons and servos coming to life.

The urgob shock troops in power armor screamed as the Sun Strikes blew through them, their armor rending and glowing with psychic feedback as it was torn apart, and the hairy barbarians within, spewing green blood as the woman hewed through them with complete abandon, and complete control; the living, the dead, the walls, and the ground were all there for her to move about on, every stroke and maneuver gliding from one to the next seamlessly.

Power greater than finesse. Cutting and hewing where Lolith would slice and slash, thrusting where she would stab. Strength and precision in a merciless whole.

The ground around them lit detonated with the explosions from the guns of the goblins' crude Striders, vaguely birdlike light mecha crewed by trained hobgoblins who had been thrown off by the infectious song that was infiltrating all the goblin coms. They had fired too soon, overeager and jumpy, and had missed their target entirely. She was now moving towards them quickly as they squealed in panic over their coms, their wild shots killing more than a few of their own kind as they tried to hit the blur their targeting systems couldn't seem to lock on.

Sweeping pulses of spiral-bound violet light wiped out their infantry support with devastating accuracy, filling the area around the three mechs with burning corpses with incredible speed, whole swathes of goblins and hobgoblin squads going up like torches.

Bolters and explosive rounds tore up the ground, none of it deterring her in the slightest as she veered in towards the first Strider.

Lolith watched, her own profile little more than a shadow, still whispering through the ranks of goblins unfortunate enough to be in her way, around her, below her, past her and dying before they really knew it.

Sun Strike one as she arrived, blowing through the first leg, going up the leg like it was a ladder, taking out the other side in another spray of shattering, molten metal, the mecha overbalancing ahead and past them. A third Sun Strike opening up the armor over its power core, and four Spikes driving in point-blank as she leapt away. As the very hot fusion core went off and cooked the screaming pilot, it blew her easily a hundred feet away, to crash into the front of the next mecha.

The pilot gawked at the glowing golden sword that had punched right through his crysteel viewpoint and was right in front of his head. The Masked woman clinging to the front of his ride smiled brightly at him, and the Shard split his head in two.

She jumped away as point-blank shots from the third mecha blasted the second away from her, her feet seeming to hit misting points in the air as she danced back and forth in the sky, avoiding the raging autocannon tracers around trying to hit her, hitting the ground, sliding along, spinning, and taking out the Achilles cables for the strider's legs with a spin before shearing a golden arc up behind it into its motor assembly. Five tails pointed up like death-spitting serpents, and fired off the burning Spikes without her even looking up.

\"-akkkK!\" the pilot screamed over the coms.

Tremble, oh oooo oh, Tremble, she comes...

The Shield drummed, the Sword chimed, and her voice purred with the promise of coming death. The staring goblins gawked at her as she moved into motion again, and their screams radiated out into the coms as hard violet light wreathed in goblin-blood green banefires reached out for them and added their calls to the coms of death.

\"akkkK!\"

\"urkkK!\"

\"gakkK!\"

The goblin invasion of Capristi II was definitely not having a good time. Wherever this Dark Angel showed up, things starting going very bad, very, very quickly...